CxG Lecture One

LSA Presession

Construction Grammar

General Plan

Day 1: Fillmore some grammatical phenomena

Day 2: Fillmore and Kay stock-taking a bit of formalism

Day 3: Kay argument structure constructions

The grammarian’s job is to figure out what it is that enables speakers of a language to do what they do with their language.

In particular, the job requires sussing out how much of this ability is accounted for in terms of their knowledge of the language itself, rather than knowledge about the world, or knowledge of conventions about communicating with

language.

The difference isn’t always obvious

Here’s an example of something that (I think) everybody “knows”.

Guess what’s going on in a department tenure hearing when one of the colleagues begins his contribution with these words:

It’s true that she’s very popular with the students

True … but …

It's true that Barak closed a huge gap in the kibbutz district within a few weeks, it's true that he received the support of most Arabs and Druze, and it's true that he has the wind in his sails -but this won't last forever.

ynet.news.com 5/29/2007

Anna Wierzbicka* has noticed from corpus evidence that clauses that begin with It is true that P are almost always followed by the word “but” - which means, of course, that “P” is conceded in an argument in which the winning point (in the speaker’s presentation) is going to be what follows the “but”.

What kind of fact is that? The same is NOT true for sentences that begin with It is

a fact that …

*2006, English: meaning and culture. Oxford U. P.

Wierzbicka is convinced that this has to do with the MEANING of true as opposed to the meaning of a fact.

Simple Gricean explanations don’t quickly come to mind that would make use of what we know about the meanings of true and a fact.

Maybe It’s true that … is a conventional “sentence-stem”

dedicated to introducing points to be conceded in an argument.

That would make it a construction, wouldn’t it?

Web-as-Corpusa two-edged sword

How nice it was, not too many years ago, to be able to say something about English, and be believed. There was a time when I confidently defined (be) friends with and its alternate (be) good friends with as a closed expression. But now there’s the internet, and it has become easy to check up on such claims. Maybe it’s possible for any noun of (potential) reciprocal relation.

Some google results, June 29 207

after is/was/am:

friends with: 1,024,000 cousins with: 3,026 brothers with: 3,072 colleagues with: 273

(“Harry Potter’s mother is siblings with Voldemort”)

Construction Grammar 1987

Twenty years ago this summer - at an LSA summer Institute - at Stanford University - Paul Kay and I, and George Lakoff, gave a two-or-three-hour presentation on construction grammar.

In those days constructions, in the Kay/Fillmore version, were represented as “boxes in boxes” (equivalent to PS representations with node labels of unlimited complexity). All information was written inside the boxes.

External and Internal Properties

external properties

int. props. int. props.

lexical form lexical form

Determination

cat nmax +num sg

cat detdef -num singlex a

cat nmax -num sglex hat

Modification

cat nmax -num sg

cat a

lex green

cat nmax -num sglex hat

Genitive

cat detdef +num ( )

cat nmax +

lex Joe

cat clitic

lex ‘s

These simplified examples make it seem that the linguistic properties of a phrase can be adequately expressed as a pile of features. That’s wrong, but my presentation won’t be able to convey the more complicated truth.

switch to Sign-based Constr. Gram.

Now suppose the “external information” included the phonological & morpholexical information as well.

Key notions of a sign-based CxG

sign

construct

construction

Signs, Constructs, Constructions

A sign is a linguistic product with all of its grammatical properties: phonological, formal, syntactic, semantic, and contextual. how is it pronounced what morphological or lexical forms make it up what properties determine its combinatory affordances what does it mean and/or how does it participate in the

integration of the meaning of the structures around it what conventions are there on how it can be used, who can

say it, etc. We can still allow ourselves to say that the sign is a

form-meaning pair, having in mind the first three, above, as matters of form, the last two as meaning.

Signs, Constructs, Constructions

Some signs are simple, some are complex. Constructions dictate how more complex signs are made up of simpler signs.

A construct is a fully specified sign paired with the list of (fully specified) signs which enter into its “creation”.

A construct can be represented as a simple tree, the “mother” being the complex sign, the “daughters” being the components whose assembly is “licensed” by a construction.

Constructs and Constructions

Obviously, not every construct is licensed by its own private construction. The grammarian has to find the simplest grammar - the smallest set of constructions (and associated principles) that jointly license all of the well-formed constructs in the language.

my hat

The phrase my hat is made up of two parts, my and hat, and something makes it possible to put those two signs together to make the more complex sign.

The sign my hat can be used as a full-fledged NP, hence as the argument of a verb (the wind blew my hat into the mud), as the object of a preposition (it fell into my hat), etc.

Neither my nor hat, alone, has such abilities.

The construct: D1: possessive pronoun, first person singular D2: singular, count noun, non-maximal M: singular NP; can be an argument in other

constructs

my hatM

myD1

hatD2

The fact that my hat is a full (maximal) NP is accounted for by the construction (“Determination”);

the fact that it is singular is determined by a principle which projects certain properties of a “head” daughter to the mother;

the fact that its semantics involves (any of a large number of) possessive relationships between ‘me’ and that hat is related to the use of a genitive with a noun that does not require a genitive determiner to satisfy an argument requirement.

What about D2? Surely not just the noun hat? Right. Can be any noun. (sort of)

Just a simple noun?. No. Noun can be modified. (my green hat)

my hatM

myD1

hatD2

The construction that licenses green hat assigns to the mother the same property that makes hat alone “incomplete”. Neither hat nor green hat can serve as an argument, needing anchoring by some kind of determiner.

A modifying adjective - of this kind - attributes something to a neighboring noun concept, and so it can be said to “select” that kind of entity.

green hatM

greenD1

hatD2

D2’s semantics constructs a self-standing concept corresponding to green hat, an instance of intersective modification, possible because green is a simple adjective and hat is a simple noun.

The role of my (or other genitives) in this context adds the notion of someone’s “possession” of the hat.

my green hatM

myD1

green hatD2

the committee’s collapse

we try a different noun

one that has a valence

The noun collapse, unlike hat, is an argument-taking noun, its valent being the entity that experiences the collapse. This element can be expressed in a Complementation construction as a sister of the noun, marked with the preposition of. D2 is the result of such a construction.

the collapse of the committeeM

theD1

collapse of the committeeD2

collapse of the committeeM

collapseD1

of the committeeD2

But if the single valent of collapse is not realized inside the noun-headed phrase, it can be expressed as a genitive determiner. Here the “possessor” stands for the entity that participates in the collapse event. the buiding’s collapse, my collapse, *my collapse of the building

the committee’s collapseM

the committee’sD1

collapseD2

Some nouns evoke frames within which the noun itself identifies one term in a relation, and the genitive identifies the other term of that relation.

The locally missing argument can be satisfied by a possessive modifier within an NP construct.

Examples: my boss, your wife, their friend, etc.

my bossM

myD1

bossD2

my favorite hat

now we try another adjective

Sometimes, even if the noun itself is not relational, an adjective of a certain kind can turn it into one. So to speak. The adjective favorite creates a relationship between a possessor and a possessed; the phrase favorite hat is not an independently understandable nominal category, the way green hat is; it has to be somebody’s favorite hat.

my favorite hatM

myD1

favorite hatD2

The function of my favorite X is not merely to pick out the most beloved of the “my Xes”; the ordinary “possessive” relations might not be appropriate at all: my favorite color her favorite composer

My favorite color is not the most beloved of what could be called “my colors”; her favorite composer is not the most preferred of “her composers”.

Summing up

M acquires property not in D1 or D2 determination, genitive

D1 “selects” D2’s type some determiners, adjectives

M acquires properties from head D number in nominals

Possessive determiners can satisfy argument requirements in a non-maximal nominal case 1: inherent in noun case 2: created by adjective

Otherwise possessives permit a large range of interpretations

Core vs. non-core

The phenomena that we’ve looked at so far are facts that every grammar has something to say about and every grammarian has thought about. There are so many alternative ways of accounting for all of the relevant facts that whole communities of scholars could be devoted to just such problems.

But then they would miss some of the intriguing problems that construction grammarians delight in.

Some of these “non-core” constructions are much more “contained” than the problems of determination, modification, predication, complementation, and argument satisfaction, and that makes them seem trivial, and sometimes gets the people who delight in them referred to as the butterfly collectors of linguistics.

And others of the non-core constructions are a bit vague and hard to pin down. Let’s look.

The poor are with us always.

the adjective poor “used as a noun”

Dictionaries often indicate that the adjective poor can be “used as a noun”, offering examples like these. The gap between the rich and the poor has

widened. The poor are with us always.

The whole phrase is an NP, to be sure, but the word poor here isn’t actually a “noun”. Some communities are divided between the

very rich and the very poor.

D1 has to be “the”. D2 has to be an adjective capable of identifying a class

of humans. We get the poor, the rich, the idle, the young, the old, the lame, the living, the dead, etc.

M’s syntax is maximal NP, M’s semantics specifies human generic plural

the poorM

theD1

poorD2

Observations

It’s possible for the M of a construct to be of a different syntactic category from its head daughter.

Other cases? PP as adjective? he’s been very out of sorts lately

I’ll be far away next week.

next week

Observations. next week is a temporal adverb phrase week is a count noun and ordinarily should take

an article the phrase the next week, with the article in

place, is a normal production, not requiring a separate construction

next week is deictically anchored; the next week is anaphorically anchored

D1 is a single word; its lex is chosen from the closed set this / next / last; this is not an otherwise recognized word class

D2 is a single word; its lex is chosen from week, month, year, century, but not day

D2 can be extended to some other words, semester, season

next weekM

nextD1

weekD2

M’s semantics appeal to the notion of calendar unit: this week is ‘in the week including now’; next month is ‘in the month following the month including now’; last year is ‘in the year preceding the year including now’.

I said this pattern doesn’t apply to ‘day’, but consider this:

next weekM

nextD1

weekD2

Suppletion? If we allow the M to have a p.o.s. category distinct from its head (“the poor”), can we allow the M to have morpholexical form distinct from that of its Ds? this day = today next day = tomorrow last day = yesterday

tomorrowM

nextD1

dayD2

Observations

In principle, a sign-based theory - as opposed to the WSYWIG version of older construction grammars - ought to be able to have “mothers” with forms that are not obviously derivable from their components.

Such a possibility should be strongly constrained: but THAT would require getting a theory of families of constructions, such as the this-next-last family, AND it would require an account of how the pre-emption a.k.a. blocking is guaranteed.

Other possibilities: gooder = better, goodest = best badder = worse, baddest = worst

I’ll be back next Wednesday.

next Wednesday

The this-last-next modifiers can also be applied to cycle-member-names next June this Friday last summer

and the semantics locates the mentioned cycle-member within the deictically anchored next-larger unit within which it “cycles” next June = ‘the June of next year’ this Friday = ‘the Friday of this week’ last summer = ‘the summer of last year’

D1 is the same as before D2 is a named “cycle-member”: weekday name, month

name, season name, day-part name, holiday name M’s semantics recognizes the cycle within which the D2

is a part and applies the usual this-next-last semantics to that

next WednesdayM

nextD1

WednesdayD2

WRT day-part names it’s restricted to: last night, this afternoon, this morning, this evening; there’s nothing with next

Rampant pre-emption with an alternative construction involving the deictic day

names: tomorrow evening, yesterday morning, etc., and the lexical form tonight.

last nightM

lastD1

nightD2

the week after next

help us find a locality-preserving way to handle this one!

the week after next

There are two patterns: the X after next = ‘the X after next X’ the X before last = ‘the X before last X’

• (identical X’s)

Depending on what kind of magic we permit in our grammar, the generalization might be recognized even with the ‘day’ unit: ‘the day before last day’ = the day before yesterday ‘the day after next day’ = the day after tomorrow

Observations

This “family” of constructions - all of them making use of principles for anchoring temporal reference in the present moment - offer interesting problems of pre-emption.

The identities in the third construction involve interpretation rather than realization. That is, the thing that’s “repeated” (the second X) is not spoken.

This is distinct from situations with overt identities in day by day, week after week, month upon month, years and years. Or drop by drop, book after book, time after time, etc.

five dollars a gallon

is this a headed phrase?

Rate expressions

One of the several ways in English to represent the concept of “rate” is a construction which provides the juxtaposition of two NPs, the first expressing a quantity of one kind of unit, the second identifying a different kind of unit.

In most binary constructions it’s easy to decide which is the “head” - but not here.

Mileage: my Hummer gets five miles a gallon Speed: we were driving at five miles an hour Cost: gasoline costs five dollars a gallon Frequency: he calls his girl friend five times a day Wages: I earn five dollars an hour Growth: my investments grow by five percent a year

M’s combinatorial properties and semantics depend on the specific pairing of the D1 and D2 units. The resulting phrases might require different perepositional marking depending on the meaning.

five dollars a gallonM

five dollarsD1

a gallonD2

Relatives

The “denominator” of rate expressions doesn’t have to be expressed as a singular indefinite NP. Variants (different constructions?) include once annually three times every two days one drop every other day twenty dollars apiece twenty dollars the pound twenty dollars per day

And there’s a kind of “recursion”: $395 a night per person 32 feet per second per second

Mine is bad, but yours is no better.

no better

the comparative of

no good?

Negating comparatives with no

Here are some examples of negating comparatives with no rather than not. it was no bigger than a sparrow she’s no older than your daughter! you’re no more qualified for this job than I am thirty years older and no smarter (than before) I don’t work any slower than you do I ate no more than my share

D1 is no D2 is a comparative phrase - adjectival, nominal,

adverbial, with or without the than-phrase mine’s not great, but yours is no better

M’s semantics is clearly different from negation-with-not but it’s hard to state. These utterances suggest that the comparand is closer to the opposite end of the scale than the scalar adjective.

no bigger than a sparrowM

noD1

bigger than a sparrowD2

D1 is no, or any in a negative polarity context she’s hardly any more likely to win than you are you’re not any more qualified for this job than I am

In general, the “determiner” no is always equivalent to “not … any”, or other negators.

(Neg…) any bigger than a sparrowM

anyD1

bigger than a sparrowD2

Observations

Stating the function of this construction is a bit of a challenge.

D2 is identified, not with respect to its head category, but to its “compared” status.

The problem of showing polarity contexts in a construction description is a challenge I’m not ready for.

I need five or six good people.

“I need five or six people to help me finish the project.” Terry Langendoen’s 2007 paper “Disjunctive

numerals of estimation” covers the construction in question. Some data, with contrasting starred examples: six or seven, *six or nine ten or twelve, *ten or thirteen fifteen or twenty, *fifteen or nineteen

This pattern with or is distinct from one with to: your package will arrive within 3 to 7 weeks *your package will arrive within 3 or 7 weeks

The numerical value of D3 exceeds that of D1, by some formula that includes 1, 2, 5, and 10.

Constructs of this construction can be the multipliers of powers of ten: five or six thousand, ten or twelve million, twenty or thirty billion.

M’s semantics is a fuzzy estimate more or less bounded by the values of D1 and D3.

six or sevenM

sixD1

sevenD3

orD2

Rules vs. preferences?

Langendoen reports that corpus evidence shows that his generalizations need improvement. “five or six” seems fine; what about “seventy five or six”? “a hundred and five or six”? They work best when they are the units or the

multipliers of complex numbers.

a mere five pages

number agreement violation?

a mere five pages

Properties of the construction instanced by this expression: requires “a” (*mere five pages) requires number (*a mere pages) requires qualifier of the number (*a five pages) can omit head N (a whopping two million)

M is a quantifier that takes a plural N’ D1’s lex is a(n), the indefinite article D3 is a number D2 is some kind of qualification of D3:

a whopping six million an additional twenty a paltry two million a respectable 600,000

a mere six hundredM

aD1

six hundredD3

mereD2

(ternary?)

This construction can appear in disguise

Compare

an extra six hundred dollars with - as we write it -

another $600

(an+other+600+dollars)

distinguished actor Charlton Heston

distinguished actor Charlton Heston

Charles Meyer (and Einar Haugen before him) identified a class of “pseudo-titles”, distinct from appositions and real titles.

Meyer, Charles F., ADS Annual Lecture: “Can You Really Study Language Variation in Linguistic Corpora?” American Speech - Volume 79, Number 4, Winter 2004, pp. 339-355

The facts are something like this:

Titles cannot be self-standing NPs; they go with full names or last names

General William G. Boykin General Boykin Deputy Under-Secretary of Defense William G.

Boykin Deputy Under-Secretary of Defense Boykin Professor Noam Chomsky Professor Chomsky

Initial NPs in appositional constructions go with full names only

the Deputy Under-Secretary of Defense William G. Boykin

*the Deputy Under-Secretary of Defense Boykin the linguistics professor Noam Chomsky *the linguistics professor Chomsky the distinguished actor Charlton Heston *the distinguished actor Heston

(notice: no commas)

Pseudo-titles are not full NPs;they go with full names only

linguistics professor Noam Chomsky *linguistics professor Chomsky distinguished actor Charlton Heston *distinguished actor Heston celebrated West Coast grammarian ...

The pattern is said to have started out in US newspapers.

The contrast

D1 is full NP D2 must be full name

“apposition” yes yes

title no no

pseudo-title no yes

Observations

Pseudo-titles are like real titles in not being full NPs, but they are like appositionals in requiring a full name.

It seems there’s a grammar to personal names, revealing a difference between full names and just family names. This is not something that most grammars deal with.

Where do they find the time?

said Mark Russell on hearing, in 1992, that the Vatican had lifted its edict against Galileo Galilei

Wherewithal: a “hidden” construction?

Now here’s something I think is a special construction, but it may be hard to convince some of you. Or maybe any of you.

Components:A. a predicate with a meaning related to ‘having’B. the word theC. a noun construable as the name of a resourceD. an infinitive complement controlled by whoever is

interpreted as the subject of the ‘having’ relation, or alternatively a Purpose phrase with for

Examples

I don’t have the money to take a vacation. We lack the staff to take on such a project. Where can I find the cash to buy something that

expensive? Do we have the resources to manage that? We don’t have the fuel to make it to the next

town. Who’ll give us the funds to do that?

(verb with ‘having’ semantics)

I don’t have the money to take a vacation. We lack the staff to take on such a project. Where can I find the cash to buy something that

expensive? Do we have the resources to manage that? We don’t have the fuel to make it to the next

town. Who’ll give us the funds to do that?

(noun construable as resource)

I don’t have the money to take a vacation. We lack the staff to take on such a project. Where can I find the cash to buy something that

expensive? Do we have the resources to manage that? We don’t have the fuel to make it to the next

town. Who’ll give us the funds to do that?

(complement controlled by ‘haver’)

I don’t have the money to take a vacation. We lack the staff to take on such a project. Where can I find the cash to buy something that

expensive? Do we have the resources to manage that? We don’t have the fuel to make it to the next

town. Who’ll give us the funds to do that?

Mystery

The construction allows us to explain the fact that the sequence [the N to VP] is not a self-standing constituent, having a bounded meaning independent of its context.

Evidence*Someone stole [the money to take a vacation].*That idiot spilled [the fuel to get us to the next town].*She just fired [the staff to complete the project].

DNI The infinitive complement can be omitted under

conditions of zero anaphora (DNI = definite null instantiation).

Usually DNI is possible only when it corresponds to an argument of some lexical unit. We lost. I’ve got an explanation. These are similar. Who’s the father? When did they arrive?

DNI without a lexical host?

Are you going to take on the new project?--No, we can’t. We lack the staff.

Can you drive me to Stanford?--Sorry, I don’t have the fuel.

Can you join us in the trip to Hawaii?--Where am I going to find the cash?

Do you think he’s ready to face down the boss?--Nah, he doesn’t have the guts.

This construction allows us to explain the definite NP in DNI-omitted cases. Consider the ambiguity of

I don’t have the cash.

Situation 1: there is some contextually understood amount of cash

Situation 2: complement omitted in reference to some contextually understood use to which the cash could be put

e.g., Are you buying an iPhone?

“Wherewithal”?

I call this the Wherewithal construction, because the noun wherewithal seems to occur only (or, well, mainly) in instances of this construction. The range of ‘having’ or ‘access’ locutions is the same as with the others:

Among the 48 instances of wherewithal in the British National Corpus we find as its governing verb have [20 instances], provide [7], give [5], lack [3], acquire [2], find [2], and one each of deny, need, offer, and winkle out. One has with (the man with the wherewithal to do it), one was an existential expression (there would not even be the wherewithal to ...), one with support (soil supports vegetation and the wherewithal to live), and one that just seems weird.

Relatives

Many of the properties of this construction are shared by enough in place of the, though enough has possibilities not shared by the.

Evidence We don’t have {enough/the} money to do that.

We don’t have {enough/the} money for such a project.We don’t have {enough/the} money.

Is there a lexical solution?

Well, we could say that the, like enough, is a lexical item that participates in a discontinuous modifier of a noun: {enough/the}…to pay for a vacation{enough/the} … for that project

Is there a lexical solution?

Or maybe would say that the noun wherewithal has in its lexical description the full account of the possibilities seen in the examples just surveyed, and other resource-naming nouns are usable in its stead by some kind of metonymy.

(ASIDE: A Google search for enough wherewithal got almost 2000 hits.)

Observations

There seem to be lots of constructions that occur in contexts involving the semantics of access or possession, broadly conceived, among them the infinitival relatives of the kind books to read.

Somebody, unknown to me, must have done research on that.